There’s one lesson to be learned from what is occasionally the most chaotic parking area in Concord: Sometimes it’s better to hand over your keys.

“When peak periods like school holidays…we come up with a valet system. We’re taking folks’ keys and stuffing cars into the lots,” said Ben Blunt, owner of Concord Coach Lines. “We can double capacity if you just stack cars. In February, we got close to 1,000 cars in a 590-space lot.”

Those 590 marked spaces are around the Stickney Avenue bus station and adjoining park-and-ride lot. However, these spots often hold more than 590 vehicles, even when there’s no valet in action, as drivers spill onto adjoining ground and streets, scrambling to find a place to park before carpooling to work or taking the bus into Boston.

“They’ll be up on slopes, down in ditches, between trees,” said Blunt.

You’ll also see them along Stickney Avenue, Herbert Street and even, if desperate, on the far side of Loudon Road.

Part of the problem is that this stretch of Concord on the west side of I-93 is not well defined, with a U-Haul station stranded in the middle and the long-neglected former Department of Transportation building at the southern end. That seems to make it easier for people to overlook marked parking spaces and leave their cars wherever they find room.

Blunt said the parking situation was crowded before COVID but the pandemic “reset it to zero.” Parking didn’t start becoming a problem again until a year-and-a-half ago, he said, as work-from-home ended and Concord Coach began running more bus routes to Boston. The recent start of the new service direct to New York City will add a few more cars to the mix.

The situation is complicated because most of the land is owned by the state, Blunt added, so the company could not, for example, charge people to park. 

Blunt said Concord Coach is talking to the state and city about possible solutions.

One other factor is the work being done by developer Brady-Sullivan to turn the old Department of Transportation building into 80 housing units. Blunt said that so far the presence of construction equipment hasn’t hurt parking availability and has actually helped it.

“The Brady-Sullivan guys have been very accommodating of parking spilling into that space,” he said, adding that “when [the housing] opens up, we will lose their accommodation.”

David Brooks can be reached at dbrooks@cmonitor.com.